


Another Thing Coming Undone

by Mosca



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Other, Queer Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-19
Updated: 2012-08-19
Packaged: 2017-11-12 11:51:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/490606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mosca/pseuds/Mosca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A queer history of Haymitch Abernathy in five sections, twenty-five Games, a revolution, and hundreds of gallons of liquor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another Thing Coming Undone

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Thistle for beta reading and Amy for cheerleading. The title is from "Runaway" by The National. 
> 
> Some small liberties taken with canon.
> 
> Labeled as queer gen because relationships are not the focus, but there are a few kisses and some discussion of sex. It's a gray area.
> 
> Additional content notes at the end.

1.

Nine days after Haymitch won the 50th Annual Hunger Games, the doctors were confident enough that his insides would stay inside, and they released him from the hospital. On the tenth day, someone sent a girl to his room. She had platinum bangs and breasts so round they were surreal. It seemed like she'd been instructed to laugh at everything he said. "I'm sorry," he told her. "Whoever sent you, they had the wrong idea."

She bounced uninvited into his lap and stroked his face, as if invading his personal space might change his mind. "Do you have some kind of moral objection?" the girl purred. "I've heard that about people from the outlying districts. That they're waiting for true love, or the word of God."

The arena had relieved Haymitch of any and all moral convictions, not that he'd held many to begin with. "No, you're... not really my type. And I have a sweetheart back home."

All of these statements were true. They were in the spirit of everything he'd said in interviews: don't lie, just give them the version you know they want to hear. His stylist, Tigris, had given him that advice as she'd fixed him up for television. The strategy had served him well enough to earn him a 9 rating going into the arena and a cadre of giggling fans who held up signs proclaiming themselves "Hay's Bitches" and bought him lifesaving parachutes. 

And it had covered up the fact that girls, generally, weren't his type. Especially not girls like this one, brimming over the top with curves and giggles and _girlishness._ Before he'd been old enough to know what it meant, he'd sat along the side of the road as the miners marched by, admiring their rough hands, the sweat that ran down their muscled shoulders, the hypnotic lowness of their voices. No one had ever told him outright he wasn't supposed to see beauty in haggard, run-down miners, but it was what he saw, and he couldn't change it.

Ma had rented out the spare bedroom when he was twelve and his brother Ebben was ten. She'd told the women in town it was for the extra money, but it was a white lie: even after Pa had died of Miner's Lungs, the Abernathys had kept food on the table. Grandma had taught Ma how to make maple rum, tapping trees in the first weeks of spring, reducing the sap in huge kettles, and distilling the fermented syrup into sweet, potent spirits. In spring and summer, Ma took Haymitch and Ebben out to gather berries and crab apples from the woods, to be crushed with a wooden press and made into wine or brandy. Ma traded the liquor at the Hob for game and goat's milk, enough to keep Haymitch and Ebben strong and pink-cheeked. more so than the kids who subsisted on the miners' salaries of living fathers. 

But the truth was, Ma needed a man around the house besides Haymitch. Ebben's body was growing big, but his mind had fallen behind. By his tenth birthday it was clear it would never catch up. He was prone to violent fits, to running naked through the neighborhood when he wriggled from Ma's arms as she tried to bathe or dress him. One day at the Hob, Ebben wrestled himself free of Haymitch. Ebben charged at a stall selling sweet potato cakes, stuffing two into his mouth and striking the poor girl in the face when she tried to prevent him from eating more. Haymitch watched the blood gush from the girl's nose, and he froze in place, helpless.

So Ma took in Natty Dunlop as a boarder and handyman. The Dunlops were a big family - Natty was somewhere in the middle of a brood of eight - and a cruel one, always hungry, the kids showing up to school with bruised arms and split lips. If Natty used his salary to pay rent to Ma, it didn't go to his shitbag father. With food in his belly, he became broad-chested and handsome, with steel gray eyes set deep into his face and a smile like maple rum, sweet and intoxicating, promising the ruin of anyone who tasted it.

When Haymitch had been fourteen, Natty had stood in the door of the distillery shed, all shadow, and told Haymitch, "You grew up nice, didn't you?" In that moment, Haymitch had gone from hopelessly infatuated to fully in love, and had stolen his first kiss without a second thought.

Haymitch's escort, Volumnia, and his stylist, Tigris, had cautioned him to keep all of this quiet from the public. Not all of it: Haymitch could talk about his dead father and slow-minded brother as much as he liked. But the family business of illegal spirits and the older man who'd been sharing his bed since he was barely out of school - those stories didn't fit with the image they were trying to create. 

So the Capitol had sent him a girl. Before he'd won, Haymitch would have been naive enough, and resigned enough to his own death, to afford her a little kindness. Now, he had forty-seven kids' blood on his hands and the dark assurance that the Capitol would have to put up with him no matter how he behaved. He left the girl to sleep on the couch and went to bed with a bottle of bourbon that Tigris had smuggled him. He drank himself into oblivion, then unconsciousness too deep for nightmares.

The next evening, after a day of televised smiles with important people and long banquets where Haymitch couldn't touch the wine, someone sent another girl. This one was slight and brown-skinned, and instead of pawing him and giggling, she asked him admiringly about his victory at the Games. He answered her in short sentences. The arena was the last thing he wanted to think about. He'd outlasted the others because he'd seen how the Games worked, known what had been expected of him and defied it. His mentor, Mags - assigned from District Four, because no one from Twelve had ever won - had urged him and Maysilee to learn edible plants and camouflage, and they'd built those into a defensive game. When everyone else had battled for supplies at the cornucopia, they'd dashed to the highest ground and dug a burrow, a look-out point where he could see most of the rest of the arena but remain invisible to their enemies. The careers seemed to forget about them, while they stayed strong on wild onions, blackberries, and (pride swallowed) colonies of crunchy wood grubs. And thin, sweet maple syrup, after the fourth day, when some wise-ass from back home parachuted Haymitch a spile and a kettle. In the real world, it would have been too late in the season for sap. Haymitch wondered if the Gamemakers even knew that.

This second-night girl, whose name was Iphigineia Trinket, said she wanted to hear everything, all the secrets they didn't show on TV. This unnervingly clean girl whose name would never be entered for a Games draw. "The big secret?" Haymitch began. "I spent most of the day bored out of my mind. Couldn't make a sound, couldn't leave my hiding place, no work to do, not even a book to read. Maysilee and I ran out of things to say to each other after day two. The only way to win was to make terrible television. That's why they're so mad I won."

"Nobody's mad you won," Iphigineia said, leaning in, placing a hand on his knee. "People admire you. Coming from where you come from, first in your District to win. It seems like the tributes from One and Two always win, and they're so smug, it's boring. Watching them all pick each other off while you sat in your hole eating bugs - it was _funny_ after a while."

Haymitch couldn't help but smile. "That's me. First comedy winner of the Hunger Games." 

Iphigineia studied him as if he'd transformed into a talking dog, then seemed to catch herself. "I keep forgetting. You weren't watching, because you were _in the Games._ After the first few days, they gave you two your own theme song. This twangy, silly tune. They'd show footage of all the other tributes beating the stuffing out of each other, and then they'd cut to you, with your music, peaceful and alone. And then it started looking like you were going to win, just by not starving to death and not getting involved, and then it stopped being funny. It started looking brave."

Haymitch didn't see what was brave about it. He didn't know any other way to be. He'd never been the type to see the point in getting into it with people. It was what Ma and Grandma had always taught him: keep to yourself, and you'll get by just fine. 

Iphigineia took his silence the wrong way. "You don't like me, do you?"

Haymitch shrugged. "I think you're nice enough." He did, in fact. He suspected that Volumnia had auditioned the girls more carefully this time around. 

"But you're not exactly waiting for me to kiss you."

Haymitch scanned the room, hoping Tigris had smuggled him another bottle. With a little courage in his blood, maybe he could force himself to kiss her. Just enough of a kiss so they'd have one for TV. It didn't seem fair to her, though, if she saw him having to take a drink before he was willing to touch her. "I thought we were just talking," was the gentlest thing he could think of to say.

"And that's all you want to do," Iphigineia said. She didn't sound betrayed or disappointed. More like she would be surprised if he told her otherwise. "Are you a lily?"

He hated not being allowed to answer that question. He froze, unable to come up with an answer that was neither a lie nor an infraction.

"I have loads of friends who are," she said proudly. "They were hoping you were. They said they could read it all over you. All that stuff about a sweetheart back home, but no name and no pronouns."

"And what do you think?"

"I think I entered the contest that got me here. _Win a romantic night with Haymitch Abernathy, victor of the fiftieth Hunger Games._ And I entered it mostly expecting we would just talk." She was pleased with herself. People in the Capitol _loved_ when they were right. 

"I wouldn't mind if you spread the rumor around," Haymitch said.

They got drunk together in his bed. She told him about her life in the Capitol, the charmless box of an apartment where she grew up, the university where she was studying international history. "They censor the foreign Web," she said, "but in orientation, someone teaches you how to hack through it. The rest of the world, it's beautiful. I mean, in the videos I've seen." She drank deep from the bottle of white liquor that they'd almost polished off. "Maybe someday I'll have enough money to bribe someone for a passport. And then I'm never coming back."

He kissed her cheek, like he was kissing her goodbye, like he was wishing her a safe journey.

In the morning, Iphigineia was gone, and Volumnia was shaking Haymitch awake frantically. "There's been an emergency!" Too cowardly to tell him more, she turned the TV on instead. It was showing footage of District Twelve, of a house on fire, of his house. "His mother, Joyceline, his brother, Ebben, and a family friend, Nathaniel Dunlop, are all reported dead. We offer our deepest condolences to the victor for this terrible tragedy."

Haymitch said nothing. He didn't cry, and he didn't scream. The table was set for breakfast, and he filled his coffee cup with what was left of the previous night's liquor. The Capitol had made it clear how they played their game: he would love who they told him to, or they would kill everyone he loved. The only solution was to numb his heart and mind, to never feel anything again.

2.

Back in District Twelve, Haymitch moved with his grandmother to the Victors' Village, a ghost town encased in shrink wrap, dusty under the assumption that a victor like him would never exist. Grandma was his only remaining relative, and the living embodiment of the flaws in the Capitol's plan. She'd been out playing cards with the other old ladies when the fire caught. It had been declared an accident, of course. It's not hard to set fire to a still, especially an illegal one built from spare parts. But no one in District Twelve believed that ruling.

Grandma picked the lock on one of the vacant houses in the Victors' Village, and directed Haymitch while he built a new still. He couldn't go out tapping trees or gathering fruit anymore, so he paid the neighbor children to do it for him. In fact, he had nothing to do but sit in his fancy house and get drunk. Grandma kept him clean and fed but steered clear of him otherwise.

He made the mistake of getting a little attached to the two tributes reaped for the fifty-first Games. Both were miners' kids, dull-eyed and bone-thin, hopeless. He taught them to run for the margins, to keep quiet, to survive. The boy ignored him and got sliced in half at the cornucopia in the first five minutes. The girl tried harder, but the game makers dropped the temperature to freezing in the middle of the night, and she died of exposure. When her cannon sounded, Haymitch drank until he blacked out.

In the years after that, Haymitch mentored in a whiskey haze. He cultivated a stench and a nasty sneer so the tributes would keep their distance. Like most men in District Twelve, he was old by twenty-five. 

The evening before the sixtieth annual Hunger Games began, as Haymitch sat in the living room of the District Twelve suite and steeled himself for the imminent deaths of two nice kids who didn't have a prayer, the Capitol sent him a boy. A young man, really, the same age as Haymitch, but life in the Capitol put fewer lines in a man's face, and they had surgery to take the lines right back out. His name was Amintor, and he wore his bright aquamarine hair in a stiff crown of inverted icicles. He said little, but he seemed willing, even enthusiastic, as he took off his clothes. The hair around his cock was the same aquamarine as the hair on his head.

Haymitch knew he was being trapped, or at least bribed. But it was nice to be touched. He took the sex he'd been given and refused to think about what he'd be asked to do in return.

The boy from District Twelve died on the first day of the Games, but the girl, Amirelle, had joined up with two other bright little things from the outlying districts, so Haymitch was still tuning in on the third day. Tigris sat with him, appeasing him with liquor. Tigris had gotten strange over the past few years, directing the surgeons to cut her nose down to a flat plane, filing her fingernails to knife points. The tributes had complained to Haymitch that she made them uncomfortable. But when he ordered up a case of good brandy, she joined him rather than berating him, and for that he liked her.

On the screen, the leader of Amirelle's tribe, a girl from District Eight named Cecelia, used river reeds to knit nets out of long blades of grass. Cecelia worked dexterously despite wearing a thick pair of leather gloves. In the background, a comical banjo-and-flute tune played: Haymitch's theme song. The cameras cut to a brawl between the boys from One and Four, which culminated in One bashing Four's brains to mush on a rock. The tribute from One limped toward the tribe's hideout, which Cecelia and Amirelle had camouflaged with cunningly woven fern fronds and moss. In a flash, a net seemed to leap out of the shelter. The boy shook it off casually, but the grass stuck to his skin, then began eating through it like acid. He fell to the ground, first yelling, then gasping as his allergic reaction to the poisonous grass sealed his throat. When he'd stopped moving, Cecelia crept out and tore the undamaged portion of the net away from him with a small knife, careful to touch it only with her gloves. Banjos and flutes accompanied her, along with the sound of cannons. "They're playing your song," Tigris said, raising her glass.

"Where'd she get the supplies?" Haymitch asked. He'd blacked himself out on the first night and missed some of the action.

"They scattered them this year, deep in the woods - all trash at the cornucopia, and the treasure buried under trees. Your girl ran right out to the margins and dug up a pack while she was looking for roots to eat. And then another, and another. She hooked up with those other two girls when they tried to fight her for supplies, and brokered an alliance instead. They have an arsenal squirreled away back there. But they figured out the poisonous grass, so they're using the nets. Those girls are too small and too untrained to be much good with conventional weapons. Amirelle came in with a 5 rating. That twelve-year-old from Nine came in with a 3."

"And there they are, taking down careers," Haymitch said. The cameras were still trained on the three little girls. Cecelia had wrapped a weather-proof blanket around herself, and she was weeping, muttering apologies for the life she'd taken. "Poor kid, what if she wins?"

Tigris raised her glass. "I'm sure you'll have no trouble teaching her how to drink."

The girls' alliance outlasted all the rest with a combination of defensive strategy and cleverly deployed poison. When it was just the three of them left, Amirelle and the girl from Nine went to sleep while Cecelia kept watch. After they'd drifted off, Cecelia blanketed them with the deadly nets, humming a lullaby. She'd gone around the bend. Feeling like he'd been shown a mirror, Haymitch wept.

3.

Haymitch's grandmother died the winter before the sixty-seventh Games. She fell asleep in front of the fire with a half-full mug of crab-apple brandy in her lap. Haymitch missed her but felt little grief. Death was cheap; the best a person could hope for was to go out warm and safe, smiling. He'd messed up everyone else's chances for that, but at least he'd protected her.

District Twelve's tributes were particularly hopeless that year. Both were seventeen and had thrown their lives away for the tesserae. At first, Haymitch thought they were ignoring his advice because they were stubborn, but he realized they were ready to die, almost excited for it. Sure enough, they both committed suicide by cornucopia in the first five minutes, relieving him of the burden of watching the rest of the massacre. Not that he had long to wait: the sixty-seventh Games bled themselves dry in eight hours, an insult to the sponsors. A pig-faced boy from District Two was crowned the victor, but he died of his injuries less than a day later. To appease the nation, a parade of notable past victors was assembled to tour the districts in his stead. There was no question that Haymitch, first and only District Twelve victor, anti-hero of the Quarter Quell, would be among them.

Two extra weeks of having to wake up before noon and remember to put on pants. Haymitch consoled himself by proving that his heightened tolerance to the effects of alcohol wasn't quite enough to prevent him from drinking until he passed out in the empty bathtub, fully dressed except for his pants, which he'd intentionally neglected to wear.

He expected to wake up to Tigris or Volumnia standing over him with mock outrage, but instead, a fire-haired boy was shaking him awake. "Thought they'd already sent me my whore for the year," Haymitch grumbled. He was far too hung-over for sex.

"They sent me to fetch you for the victors' banquet," the boy said.

"Tell 'em I'm sick. Tell 'em I'm dead. They'll be thrilled to be rid of me. Maybe they'll throw an extra banquet in my honor."

"If I have to go fake a smile, then so do you," the boy said. As Haymitch's vision cleared, he identified his rescuer. He was a recent victor from one of the inner districts, Finland O'Hare, something like that. 

Haymitch let Finland drag him out of the tub and splash cold water on his face. He didn't even resist when Finland turned on the shower, stripped him down, and threw him under the spray. But when the boy took off his own clothes and jumped in with him, Haymitch cried out, "Now, Finland -"

"Finnick," Finnick corrected him, gently.

"You said you weren't a whore."

"No," Finnick said. "I said I was sent to fetch you. Effie told me you were an old friend, and that I might be the most effective."

"I don't know an Effie."

"She's the new District Four escort," Finnick explained. "She said she met you right after you won your Games."

"I met a lot of people then." Sometimes, Haymitch hated the way liquor had dulled his memory - not very often, but when he did, the hatred burned.

"Well, I'll have to reintroduce you at the banquet." Finnick made a bold move for the soap, and Haymitch didn't stop him. It smelled like pine trees and seawater, and now so did both of them. The hot water and Finnick's touch were scrubbing out Haymitch's foggy mind as much as his skin. They were doing a good job of clearing up Haymitch's whiskey dick, too. Before Haymitch could sort out his feelings about that, Finnick ran a soapy hand down his chest and kissed him softly.

Haymitch let the kiss go on for a few moments, and then his mind was too clear to continue. "How old are you, Finland?"

"Sixteen," Finnick said, like that was very old.

"How old do you think I am?"

Finnick paused, probably calculating in his head. "Thirty-three?"

"And how many times older than you does that make me?"

"Two point -" Finnick dropped his hands away from Haymitch's chest. "Something. I'm not that good at math."

"Close enough."

The water plastered Finnick's red curls to his face. He looked like an angel in a mural in a ballroom in the Capitol. "You wouldn't be the oldest person to fuck me."

"But surely the most repulsive."

Finnick looked him over. "Not by a mile." Before Haymitch could ask what the Capitol had done to him, Finnick added, "I've been kind of passed around since I won. People will pay a lot for a night with the heartthrob of the Hunger Games."

"I'm sorry," was all Haymitch could think of to say.

"Don't be. It's even fun sometimes." Finnick stopped for another long, intrusive, oddly flattering stare at him. "And it's not half as bad as what they did to you."

"I did this to myself."

"Neither of us believes that," Finnick said. He kissed Haymitch again. There was nothing sexual about it this time: although their lips were touching, it was more like an embrace between brothers.

Finnick guided Haymitch through shaving, teeth-brushing, and finding a wearable pair of pants. He neither asked for nor offered anything more than hygiene. Haymitch arrived at the banquet almost presentable and barely late. Finnick sat with him, and so did Cecelia, who'd kept up correspondence with him since her victory. Among the Capitol representatives, she was gracious and well-behaved, but when given the choice, she'd whisper snide commentary to Haymitch. Her strategy for life after the Games was the same as during them: she disappeared from sight and kept her claws sharp.

Midway through the salad course, a woman decked out in full Capitol ridiculousness tapped Finnick on the shoulder. "Come on. There are some people who'd like to meet you."

"I'm getting to know Haymitch Abernathy, like you encouraged me to do," Finnick replied, smooth as a dagger across the throat. "In fact, he told me he'd been hoping I'd introduce you, since he doesn't remember you at all, Effie."

Playing Finnick's game, Haymitch shook her hand with inappropriate vigor. Effie had bleached her skin to a pinkish white and sculpted her hair into a tower of lavender curls, but he recognized her serious blue eyes and narrow nose. "Good to see you again after all this time, Iphigeneia," he said. He stifled a burp: last night's whiskey and today's hors d'oeuvres were warring in his stomach, and the whiskey seemed to be winning.

"I hope you're enjoying yourself," she said with a cold, terse smile.

"I never would have expected to see you here, Iphigeneia." As Haymitch repeated her name, he watched Finnick grin vengefully. "I would have thought you'd have gotten to La Paz or Tianjin by now."

"Serving as an escort for the Games provides plenty of opportunities for travel. Most new escorts are assigned to the outlying districts, but I was lucky enough to be assigned to Four." Her tone was flat and cold. Haymitch had begun the conversation wondering what the Capitol had done to deaden her spirit, but now he suspected that their efforts had failed. Effie had painted over her soul until it was invisible, and that was how she was keeping it alive.

Haymitch tried to figure out how to hint to her that he understood, but the whiskey won the war for dominance of his stomach, and in its victory dance, hurled the remains of its conquered victims all over Effie's shoes.

He followed her to the ladies' room to help her clean herself up. At the door to the washroom, she sized him up and said, "I guess you're a lady as much as you're anything."

Effie had a bottle of cleaning spray in her handbag, and her shoes were good as new in seconds. "I'd like you to keep an eye on Finnick for me. He reminds me a bit too much of you."

"Most of the time, I hardly manage to keep an eye on myself," Haymitch said.

She scrutinized him again. He was starting to believe that her judgmental eye was a form of kindness. She said, "You're here, aren't you? With what you've been put through, I'm inclined to think someone doesn't want you to be. But you're a survivor, as you've always been."

Haymitch had stopped fearing that the Capitol was out to get him long ago. He'd assumed they'd forgotten about him and moved on to more telegenic, less self-destructive victors. But the Capitol, like Effie, never forgot anything, even when it seemed to disappear. That was what she was warning him to do: keep his memory sharp. He coded a way of letting her know he'd gotten the message. "You're a damn good survivor, too."

"I learn from the best," Effie said. She dabbed at her spotless shoes one last time. "And so should Finnick. Say you'll look after him."

"I'll do what I can," Haymitch promised, hoping that it was more than nothing.

4.

Haymitch wasn't made to live underground. Even if he hadn't won the Games, he would have earned his bread by moonshine, not by mining. The DTs would have gone so much easier if only he could breathe some fresh air. Lying in a dark concrete room, shaking and vomiting, hallucinating sword-beaked birds with Maysilee and Cecelia's faces - how again was this better for him than the perpetual balm of liquor? 

People in District Thirteen liked to tell him that things were happening for his own good, and he liked shouting back that he was forty-one goddamn years old and could be as bad for himself as he wanted to be. Thirteen was all rules and conformity, all of what he resented most about the Capitol, and none of what he didn't mind. If this was the new world order, well, Haymitch had to seriously consider leaving the world. He knew he wouldn't go through with it, though. His survival instinct always kicked in when it was least convenient.

He lay on his flat, gray mattress - on his side, so he wouldn't choke on his own stomach acid - and tried not to dream. Under his pillow, he'd tucked a weapon he'd made from a toothbrush and a shaving razor, but it couldn't protect him from his imagination. The killer birds became circling dire crows, the muttations invented to eat corpses that needed to disappear without a trace. Dire crows devoured human flesh down to the bones, and then they ate the bones. They made people cease to exist.

Before Haymitch was fully awake, he found himself holding his toothbrush knife to a visitor's throat. "Haymitch. Haymitch. I don't know what that is, but put it down."

The familiar voice brought Haymitch back to his senses. "Finland! Forget it, I'm still not going to fuck you."

Finnick grinned puckishly and held up his forearm, printed with his tasks for the day. "It doesn't say anything here about sex. Only that I'm to bring your lunch and stay until you've eaten it. Or until 14:00, when I have permission to go to target practice and abandon you to your own filth."

Haymitch's stomach made a surprisingly optimistic noise. "I guess I could eat. No guaranteeing I'll keep it down."

"Wait 'til you see what it is. You might change your mind." Finnick uncovered Haymitch's tray, revealing a bowl of steaming gray stew. "Turnips and... glop. And bread."

Haymitch accepted the meal and dipped his bread into his glop. As usual, the food was bland but nourishing. Since his stomach was empty but settled, he welcomed the inoffensive mush. "District Thirteen sure is good at taking the fun out of dinner," Haymitch said. "And everything else. You sure you want to go down fighting for this?"

"I don't think there's any turning back from it now," Finnick replied. "And I think change is worthwhile. Any change. Just the possibility of something other than the way things are."

Haymitch nodded. He couldn't disagree with either point. Also, lunch had come with a mug of tea, and it seemed to contain herbs that eased his digestion and took the edge off his temper. After a week of agony, his benevolent overlords had offered relief.

But something made his body retaliate: a hidden ingredient in the tea or the stew, or a desperate plea from his system to stop cleansing it and return to the slow, comforting poison of alcohol. Haymitch's hands began to shake, and then his body, while pain seared from his gut to the tips of his fingers and toes. When the attack ebbed, he discovered that Finnick was holding him, stroking his hair and repeating that it would be all right. "At least I didn't hurl it back up this time," Haymitch joked weakly.

Finnick kissed Haymitch's forehead as if mistaking him for someone else. Haymitch wondered how many times Finnick had done this for Annie when she'd been wracked with nightmares and terror. "Don't waste your time on me," Haymitch said. "Go be with your girl."

"Annie? I'm sure she's busy in the greenhouse. She's doing fine, and when she's fine, she hates it if I smother her."

"Well, you could at least have the sense to not kiss me," Haymitch said.

Finnick didn't answer right away. "I did that, didn't I?"

"Forget it," Haymitch said. "Never happened."

Finnick brushed Haymitch's face with his knuckles so gently that it almost felt like an accident. "You won't," he said. "You'll remember every second of this, won't you? No matter what I do."

"I will as long as District Thirteen keeps me away from my whiskey." But Haymitch knew even that wasn't true. His grandmother had once told him that his memory was like a weed. No matter how many times he tried to poison it, it grew back.

Finnick kissed him again, this time on the lips, with intention.

"I'm too sick to get it up anyhow," Haymitch said, a last weak attempt to dissuade him.

"Then let yourself be kissed." Finnick didn't give Haymitch another chance to deny him. The kisses were warm like milk and sunlight, like the burn of morning liquor in Haymitch's belly. He barely kissed back, allowing Finnick's touch to ease him into comfort and sleep.

A couple of weeks later, Finnick died in a raid on the Capitol. There was footage, but Haymitch refused to watch it. Instead, he went to Annie, who was alone in her bunk like a statue of a grieving girl. Expecting nothing, Haymitch sat down next to her. She neither spoke nor moved. Haymitch had used this tactic himself plenty of times: if he ignored people long enough, they often went away. If she never acknowledged him, he'd still have some time in a quiet room where no one was watching Finnick get eaten alive on television. 

"I was half hoping you'd brought a bottle of wine," Annie said after a very long time. "Even though I know that's impossible."

"No such luck."

"Finnick would be furious that no one could drink a toast to him," she explained. "It's the custom in Four. He should have been sent off into the water. And then we'd drink until we were happy again." She patted her belly. "Even the baby."

Haymitch raised an imaginary glass. "Here's to senseless deaths."

Annie pantomimed clinking glasses together and clicked her tongue to mimic the sound. They pretended to drink, pretended they could honor everyone they'd lost.

5.

After the Rebellion, Haymitch settled into what remained of his old house and immediately resumed drinking. Liquor was a sweet old lover, one he'd never meant to leave. As he rebuilt his home, he found himself drinking less than before, just enough to dull the edges of his emotions, to deepen his sleep so he could forget his nightmares in the morning. When a girl from the reconstruction team brought him a basket of fluffy white goslings, he accepted them, not expecting a lifetime commitment. But he quickly came to appreciate them: their dependability and their dependence on him, their stupid wonder at dandelions and dirt piles, their noisy insistence that he get out of bed before noon to toss grain in their direction, and later, when they'd grown up, to collect their eggs. 

They distracted him from all the people he'd lost. Everyone but Katniss and Peeta, who kept an affectionate eye on him, and Effie, who was on the other side of the world. In its efforts to normalize relations with the rest of the world, Panem had made her its ambassador to Australia. She sent him long letters full of pictures - exotic animals, exotic people. The new web transmitter towers worked often enough that he even got to read them. The electricity cut out once or twice a week, but the managers of the power and data stations were transplants from Three and Five who kept things running smoothly as possible.

District Twelve was full of new blood. One of the first acts of Panem's new government had been to tear down the fences and allow travel throughout the country. With people free to live where they wanted, Twelve was soon full of immigrants from the Capitol and the core districts. Some had come to assist in reconstruction, admired the beauty of the region, and stayed. Others arrived with the intention of escaping their pasts, of putting distance between themselves and their lost families, property, and senses of security. Most didn't know the first thing about fending for themselves in the countryside, and the few surviving natives of Twelve did their best to acclimate their new neighbors. The transplants didn't quite get along with the natives, and Twelve ran a little wild with fistfights and thieves. But most people seemed to like energetic anarchy better than quiet desperation.

The immigrants did bring education and ideas, and those provided a new identity for the region. With the nuclear plant in Thirteen and the solar fields at full productivity in Five, there wasn't much need for dirty, dangerous coal anymore. On TV, Peeta cracked a joke about District Twelve: Miscellaneous, and as with most of his sound bites, it stuck. Twelve produced cheese, soap, leather, and glassware. People kept bees for honey and processed beets into sugar. The rebuilders turned the spent mines into reservoirs, and the captured water irrigated fields of rice, sweet potatoes, peanuts, and hemp.

But Haymitch made liquor. A trio of young men from District One - boys, really - had sought Haymitch out. All three had spent their childhoods in training to become tributes, and his face was familiar to them from the videos they'd watched. Unsure of what to do with them, Haymitch taught them his one practical skill and helped them build a distillery. He called them Tweetle, Deetle, and Beetle because he couldn't tell them apart, round-faced and blond as they were, but they embraced the nicknames. "They're a fresh start," Tweetle told Haymitch. "Better than being a bunch of washed-up careers who weren't going to get picked."

"I always wondered what happened to kids like you," Haymitch said.

"Some ended up working at the training center or joined the Peacekeepers. Some went to the diamond factories like everyone else without an apprenticed art. A few just became washed-up old drunks." Tweetle had a sharp wit and no tact; Haymitch found this endearing. Tweetle also had a taste for liquor, unlike the other two, who were more inclined toward mathematics and competition. Deetle and Beetle kept the business running, but Tweetle was the son that Haymitch might have fathered in another life. He came by Haymitch's house at dusk with unmarked bottles full of experimental potions. He often wound up sleeping on the loveseat in Haymitch's front room.

Katniss and Tweetle did not get along. Haymitch assumed it was a sort of sibling rivalry, but as it turned out, their disharmony was two parts personal incompatibility and three parts Katniss's mistaken conviction that Haymitch had designs on Tweetle. "Tweetle likes girls," Haymitch explained when Katniss finally admitted what her problem was. She'd brought her new baby along to visit, and the three of them sat on Haymitch's porch watching the geese mill about. He continued, "He likes them so much he's trying out every one in town before he settles on any."

"A strategy you approve of," Katniss scoffed.

"Better than stringing them along. Giving them false hope."

"Says the master of stringing people along," Katniss said.

"Who have you ever seen me string along?" He honestly had no idea who she was talking about.

"A certain neighbor of yours? Happens to drop by a lot?" 

And now he knew. Achates Wong had come from the Capitol to start a goat farm a mile up the road from Haymitch's house. A few times a week, Achates Wong would knock on Haymitch's door, offering to exchange a jug of milk for some goose eggs. These visits stank of Katniss and Peeta's surveillance, so Haymitch tolerated them graciously but kept them as brief as possible. "The one you've sent to check up on me?"

Katniss fixed a steely, Seam-eyed stare on him, as if she could break him down. She fell into soft laughter before he moved a muscle. Haymitch liked her laugh; he'd heard so little of it before the Rebellion, but these days it seemed like she could barely hold it in. "We didn't send him. Not even Peeta. Encouraged him to introduce himself when he first got here, yes, but the rest was all his doing." She laughed some more while Haymitch sat dumbfounded. "Do you think you're such a run-down old mess that no one could ever like you?"

"That's about right."

"Everyone who gets to know you, learns to love you," Katniss said. "If you left your house more often, you'd have screaming fans chasing you every time you came to town. It's a _gift._ "

Poor at taking compliments and too sober to do anything disgusting - not that he was capable of fazing Katniss - Haymitch grunted noncommittally.

"Your friend lost his husband in the Rebellion," Katniss said.

"How do you know all this stuff?"

"Oh, Peeta, he gets everyone's life story." With that, the baby began to fuss, and Katniss hurried apologies. It was getting late, after all, and Haymitch had had enough of her matchmaking efforts. 

Alone in his house with a bottle of Tweetle's finest potato whiskey, Haymitch thought about fucking. Not about romance, as Katniss would have liked, but he wasn't aching for love. With the distillery boys and the growing Mellark family nearby, he was the least lonely he'd ever been. But he'd come to believe that his sex life was in the past, that he'd content himself with his right hand for whatever time he had left. He didn't know what to do with the possibility of a lover, and he hated the likelihood that he'd do what he'd always done, not just with men but with everything: hide, drinking, until the danger had passed.

He drank all night and didn't sleep. When exhaustion pulled him under, the old nightmares kicked him awake. The squish and slam of knives through flesh as he stabbed his competitors to death. Maysilee's blood running warm over his arms and chest. The chill of an ax in the gut and the relief of knowing he was going to die taking revenge on his attacker. Waking up angry to be alive. Ma, Ebben, and Natty, burning to death half a world away. Cecelia and Mags in the arena, out of reach. Finnick dragged down by muttations in the Capitol. All the reasons Haymitch didn't deserve to be alive, didn't deserve comfort or sleep, didn't deserve love.

As dawn broke, he either succumbed to exhaustion or blacked himself out. The geese honked him awake, and there was Achates Wong on his doorstep with a jug of milk. He stumbled to the door, electric with panic and feeling like he'd been clubbed in the head. "I had a rough night," Haymitch slurred. "Haven't gotten to the eggs yet. You might as well come back tomorrow."

"Nonsense," Achates said. He didn't throw Haymitch into a cold shower the way Finnick would have. He didn't scold like Katniss or sigh like Effie. Instead, he asked Haymitch to lead him out to the goose pasture, and they hunted together for new eggs in the nests. When they returned to Haymitch's house, Achates made breakfast: yesterday's bread soaked in today's milk and eggs and fried in goose fat. Achates ate without insisting that Haymitch participate. Everything was optional, a suggestion.

Haymitch accepted the food but kept his nightmares to himself. As Achates left, he managed to say, "Thanks for breakfast. Thanks for the company." And as Achates assured him it was nothing at all, Haymitch managed to kiss him.

It wasn't an epic kiss. It didn't stop time. The game makers wouldn't have known what kind of music to play in the background. It was an out-of-practice kiss, mostly nerves and teeth. But it was a kiss returned.

When it ended, Achates stood on Haymitch's front porch with his hands in his pockets, unmoving. He cleared his throat. "I've been in love with you since I was twelve," he said.

"There's some holes in my memory, but I don't think I've known you that long," Haymitch replied.

"The year you won," Achates said, as if he couldn't tell whether Haymitch was being stubborn or clueless, and hadn't figured out that he was both. "I couldn't wait to get home from school during those Games so I could see if you were still alive. I kept your picture on my school tablet until a gang of other kids found out and beat me up for it. I used to dream about getting out of there and moving to District Twelve - we didn't know how hard life was, that people were starving, just that it was as far away from the Capitol as you could go. After the Rebellion, I knew I had to get away, and all those childhood fantasies - I'm here because of you. I know that sounds awful and crazy. I wouldn't blame you for wanting to take back that kiss."

"If there's one thing I've learned," Haymitch said, "it's that I can't take anything back."

"That's -" Achates seemed at a loss as to the rest of the sentence.

"I hope you'll be back tomorrow," Haymitch finished for him. It was what they had that was new: hope. For all Haymitch knew, his liver could give out on him tonight and poison him to death before Achates's next visit. But for all he knew, he'd die toothless and ancient with this man by his side, two withered old lilies surrounded by goats and geese. No one could keep that second possibility from seeming real. What little Haymitch had left, nobody could take away. If that was freedom, he supposed he could adapt to it.

**Author's Note:**

> Content notes: Non-explicit underage sex, including offstage sex between teenagers and men in their twenties and thirties. Consensual kissing between a sixteen-year-old and a man in his thirties. Violence similar to that in the books. Long-term alcohol abuse, because it's Haymitch.


End file.
